Religion Is a Force for a Good Education? Hitchens/Blair Debate in Toronto Motivates Some Reflection

November 26, 2010

As thousands of people watch
Christopher Hitchens and Tony Blair debate
"Religion is a force for good in the world" here in Toronto tonight
(and many more follow online or at public screenings like the ones we're
hosting in Toronto, Calgary and elsewhere), I'm reflecting on one of my
personal issues: "Is religion a force for good education?" We often
here that students in religious schools, especially the Catholic
publicly funded school system in Ontario, outperform their secular
counterparts. But is this really true? Certainly former British Prime
Minister Tony Blair thinks so, as he authorized the public funding of
state muslim, jewish and other faith schools in the UK.

But an article in the Economist, "
State Schools and Selection: The Religious and the Rational
",
came out not too long ago calling for some critical thinking with
respect to the British educational system. It turns out that the claims
that such religious schools offer a better quality of education are
based on a fundamental data bias.

The proportion of children entitled to free school meals
at Catholic and Church of England schools is lower than at
non-religious state schools. The Church of England has promised to set
aside places at its new schools for children whose parents profess
other religions or none at all, but the pledge has no legal force.

As the Economist reported back in April 2009 in "
Education Reforms: Out the Window
",
pupils attending religious schools aren't improving their performance,
as we would expect if religious education was of a higher quality.

The study looked at GCSE results in both sorts of
schools. “We could have found that faith schools benefited all
parents, including those who didn’t, or couldn’t, choose them, if
other schools improved in an attempt to hang on to pupils,” says Anna
Vignoles, one of the researchers. But they came across no such benign
competitive effects—indeed, they found no effects at all. Children at
religious schools made no more progress than those at secular ones,
and areas where there were many religious schools did no better than
those where there were few. “What is described as a quasi-market
clearly is not working,” concludes Ms Vignoles.

Rather, religious schools benefit religious parents and their
children on the one hand, and teachers and the schools themselves on the
other, for one simple reason.

...by giving religious people more choice than other
parents, the government has weakened competitive pressures in another
way. The researchers checked which schools had the most students with
the best prospects for academic success in their neighbourhoods. Most
religious schools turned out to have more than their fair share of
bright, well-off kids, and correspondingly fewer stragglers and poor
ones. If secular schools with religious neighbours know that whatever
they do they will get lumbered with the hardest pupils to teach, they
may resign themselves to being at the bottom of discerning parents’
wish lists and give up trying

Faith schools have the ability to choose which pupils they admit.
Secular schools must accept everyone. Religious schools may open their
doors to students that are for reasons quite apart from faith of higher
aptitude, or children of wealthier parents (which statistically tends to
correlate with higher parental education). Secular schools by contrast
end up being left with the rejected students. On top of which, secular
schools are biased towards having a higher per capita of children of
religious parents that don't care enough about their children's
education to shop around. Such children are statistically at higher
risk for doing poorly in school, again for reasons quite apart from
faith or the lack thereof.

I'd try to telepathically share this data with Hitchens tonight, although I suspect he'll do just fine on his own!

Comments:

#1 Uzza (Guest) on Saturday November 27, 2010 at 9:11am

Religious education is an oxymoron

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I'm the Executive Director of the Centre for Inquiry Canada and co-host the student oriented Course of Reason podcast. As an outspoken advocate of freedom of expression and inquiry, science education, church-state separation, and equality rights for non-believers, I have the pleasure of representing freethinkers regularly on the Michael Coren Show on CTS TV as well as in the National Post's Holy Post. I also contribute to Free Inquiry and Skeptical Inquirer magazines.